Author Archives

Christopher Null is the founder and owner of Null Media LLC. A 20-year veteran of the magazine and internet trade, he's worked for some of the biggest names on the web and in publishing, including Yahoo!, Intuit, Ziff-Davis Media, Future Networks, McGraw-Hill, and CMP Media.

I’m constantly thinking about how we can help improve the state of corporate blogging in the world, and it’s a tough challenge. I think the main problem is the word corporate. Much as a “corporate suit” doesn’t inspire confidence and a “corporate office park” doesn’t make you want to hang out for the day, a […]

Want to build a great business blog but don’t know where to start? Consider these nine tips to help get you on your way. 1. Blog daily if possible, or at least a few times a week. 2. Understand your reader/audience. When preparing every post, think about who you want to read it and what […]

When we’re bringing a new client onboard, this is a question that invariably comes up early in the conversation: “I know my company should be blogging, but how often should we blog?” The easy answer is this: As much and as often as you possibly can. For most companies, even a “heavy” blog posting schedule […]

Just ran across this statistic from Hubspot: How much business blogging is best? To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t. The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the […]

Leave it to my alumni magazine (The University of Texas at Austin) to offer an insightful look into a major pet peeve of professional writers: Over-use of the word “I.” In years of editing thousands of works of film criticism, this has been perhaps my biggest pet peeve. (And yes, I’m aware that I’m breaking […]

We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again: The way you get people to pay attention to you in the blog world is not by writing about yourself but about writing about what people are interested in. The Intuit Small Business Blog recently published an interview with Chris Brogan, who puts it in simpler […]

Loved this interview with Michael Stelzner on the subject of offering web visitors free content, courtesy of the Intuit Small Business Blog (which we edit). The #1 takeaway is right here: “Your content needs to be commercial free,” Stelzner says, drawing from the core argument of his book, which has won rave reviews from all […]

Today’s consumers are smart, savvy, and more sophisticated than ever when it comes to buying things. The internet has made comparison shopping trivially easy — but it’s also opened the floodgates for all kinds of hazards: Spam websites, shady fly-by-night merchants, and shoddy knockoff products galore. The result is that if you’re lucky enough to […]

Recently I did a little math and calculated that I had written or edited some 15,000 blog posts in my career to date. That’s a mammoth number… and it’s taught me more than a few lessons about what to do and what not to do when writing a blog post for your business. Today I’m […]

I really liked what Daniel Newman had to say about small business blogging in the Huffington Post. To wit: Since there are a million experts that will tell you how to use social media, I want to focus on something that can truly help your business reach a targeted audience and drive more readership, build […]